Loss, and the Grief that follows, has never been more honestly explored.

The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion (2005)

On the 10^th of February, 1991, my father slipped from life after a long, debilitating illness.  My brother and I were at school, my mother was at work, and my grandma was at home with my dad.  We knew it was coming.  We had reached a point where we just didn’t want my father to suffer anymore.  He had been unable to speak for months, the cancer having dwindled his once robust body to a thin wisp.  He was barely 70 lbs.  He was 46 years old.

On the 30^th of December, 2003, the author Joan Didion was settling down to dinner with her husband, having returned from a visit to the ICU where their daughter was currently under examination, when her husband stopped talking and slumped forward onto the table.  The paramedics were called but he was pronounced DOA at the hospital.  Joan’s husband John, a fellow author, was also 46 years old.

Losing a loved one over a period of months or years is its own kind of torture.  The living must come to grips with the inescapable fact that death is coming for someone they care about.  The grief hits way before death.  It hits when you no longer recognize your father in front of you.  It comes when you sit and think, “I am going to have to grow up all by myself, now.”  It struck when I realized my mother had to come to her own realization that she would continue living, while the person she had known since childhood, and married at age 21, and lived and loved and fought with and raised children with for decades would sooner or later be gone.

Joan Didion experienced a wholly different grief.  She had to suffer the grief of the unexpected departure.  Her husband died right in front of her.  Her daughter was under intensive care at a hospital.  She was alone.  She had to continue on alone.  This book, The Year of Magical Thinking, is a deeply personal exploration of a mind under the most acute grief.  As a writer, she is concerned with how thoughts form, why ideas are created, why thoughts occur.  In this book, she details her experiences not only with the nuts and bolts of what happens once someone in your house dies, but also the deep schism that occurs in the mind of the grieving survivors. 

Joan Didion suffered much differently than my family did when we lost our father.  With our dad’s passing, there were few questions such as the ones Ms. Didion asks herself.  She repeatedly agonizes over whether there were something she could have foreseen, something she could have changed, or some action she could have taken that would have altered the oncoming cardiac arrest that took her husband.  She pores over the medical literature to try and make sense of what had happened.  Endless questions and regrets and what-if’s flit through her mind, but she comes to understand that it is the state of grief itself that is keeping her conscious thought from behaving in the rigorous, writer-worthy intricacies she is used to.  It is this state that she describes so well, and which is applicable to anyone and everyone suffering through the loss of a loved one.

I cannot imagine what losing my father would have been like had we to deal with what Joan Didion had to.  Their daughter was chronically ill, in and out of ICU’s and specialist clinics.  Joan’s experience with her daughter (who passed soon after the publication of this book) is perhaps closer to our experience losing our dad.  I cannot imagine how Joan Didion managed to survive this grief.  I can barely imagine how my mom survived losing her best friend, my father, and she had two healthy children. 

Joan Didion has done a great service to people who are suffering from loss, or who know it is on its way.   As she describes in the book, Grief is a state of mental instability.  It is an imbalance.  The “year of magical thinking” she used as the title for this book is something may trauma survivors deal with.  In Ms. Didion’s case, the magical thinking consisted of believing that if she just kept his clothes clean, if she kept her husband’s library exactly as it was when he died, if she just continued on, her husband would come back.  She describes the shock her system received when the hospital called asking her if she was willing to donate her husband’s body to science.  “If I do so, he will not come back.”  Joan knew these were deluded thoughts.  She could not will her mind to think rigorously. 

As she stated in the book, Mourning happens after Grief.  Grief is inconsolable, irrational, and erases all other hope and desire.  Some people grieve forever.  Some grieve so hard they end up dying from a lack of desire to live.  Other people work so hard at hiding their Grief that they end up doing irreparable damage to their own psyche.  It took over a year for Joan to begin to actually Mourn.  It took me far longer than that, as I distracted myself with starting college.

I want to thank my lovely wife Elizabeth Saenz for this recommendation.  I gifted this book, and the companion piece, “Blue Nights”, about the life and death of their daughter Quintana a couple of Christmases ago to her.  As the 28 anniversary of my father’s death came and went this year, with its typical onset of melancholy and sadness, she told me it was time for me to read “The Year of Magical Thinking.”  As always, she was correct.  Death is but the opposite of Life.  We will all suffer the loss of someone close to us.  We will all need to grieve and mourn at some point in our life.  This self-exploration of the grieving mind is an invaluable resource.  I think it would help many grieving people to understand that what they experienced was normal.  They need to know that we all suffer this way.  We all lose our minds in grief, whether Death took our loved one quickly, or over a prolonged period of suffering. 

The hardest part of grief is the awareness that all the while, the world moves on, uncaring, and unconcerned about your loss.  Businesses must run, schools must start, and people must go on about their lives.  As we walk through our lives, we never know which co-worker, fellow shopper, or neighbor is in a state of acute Grief, but is sleep-walking through their life in the only way they know how.  It pays to be mindful of this.  In the wise words of Kurt Vonnegut, “We are all here to help each other get through this, whatever ‘this’ is.”

(This book can be purchased here: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING )

The Spirit Molecule and the Possibilities of DMT

DMT: The Spirit Molecule – A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences – Rick Strassman, M.D. (2001)

            There are a few fields of human scientific exploration where the amount we know is far outweighed by the vastness of what we do not know.  The study of consciousness, of how or why a nervous system and a collection of neurons embedded in fat tissues results in what we experience as self-consciousness, or awareness, has been explored for ages by theologians, mystics, and recently by scientists.  It is a very difficult field of study since we are using the same mechanism we are studying to make sense of what we are studying. How can the brain analyze itself, if our reality is but a construct of that same brain?  How do people experience consciousness outside of their bodies, whether through trauma, near-death-experiences, mystical states, or psychotropic chemicals?  These are huge questions, and we are just beginning to truly delve into them.

            One of the many ways that humans have expanded their innate consciousness and connected with what they felt was the eternal divinity, has been through the ingestion of intoxicants.  Many different things have been used, from herbs, to alcohol, to hallucinogenic plants and animals.  For many humans throughout history, this was the way they connected with the spirits, with the powers that they felt created and controlled the world around us.  Scientists have a hard time studying these experiences, as they are usually very subjective, and one person’s inner truths and revelations may not make much sense to another.  It is hard to get any definitive data.

            Dr. Rick Strassman, through his research into the compounds created by our brain to regulate body functions (serotonin and melatonin for example), was drawn to what is still a mystery in our brains. This mystery is the pineal gland.  In many species, what is our pineal gland is a third eye of sorts, capable of detecting light and dark and situated above and between the two regular eyes of primitive creatures like snakes and lizard and turtles.  In humans however, this gland is located in between the two halves of our brain.  It is not part of the brain per se.  It grows from the roof of our mouths, our palettes, and rises up into the brain sometime after the first month of conception.  What drew Dr. Strassman to the pineal gland was a synchronicity he experienced while researching the pineal gland.  He read that, around the 49^th day after conception, the pineal gland secretes a large amount of Dimethyltriptamine, or DMT, a very simple molecule that has profound effects on our brains and consciousness.  DMT is naturally occurring in much of the plant and animal life on Earth.  At the same time, Dr. Strassman was engaged in a long personal exploration of Buddhism, and he read that the Buddhists believe that the 49^th day after conception is when the soul enters the fetus, reincarnating into its next form.  Knowing of the effects that DMT can have on the brain, this coincidence sparked a desire to understand in Dr. Strassman.

            There are a lot of situations where the pineal gland secretes vast amounts of DMT directly into the brain.  These are usually trauma events, such as when a woman gives childbirth, in a baby when the baby is actually born, and also when we are about to die.  People who have taken DMT as a drug experience something that is so fast-acting, so otherworldly, so rife with a deeper consciousness than they ever knew existed, that it begged the question of why our body floods our brain with such a chemical during high levels of stress and trauma.  Dr. Strassman wondered if the chemical DMT could not be referred to as the “spirit” molecule, for it seems to be the compound that allows our consciousness to either connect or travel to, an elevated level of existence.

            Dr. Strassman details his efforts in getting this study to take place, the hardships that took years to grind through, and the experiences he had with his test subjects.  Some of the chapters cover the clinical aspect of the experiments.  Others deal with the variety of experiences that the test subjects related to Dr. Strassman upon the completion of their DMT doses.  Some subjects felt they were pulled to a higher state of reality.  Others, many others, felt they were being guarded/watched/taught by entities they encountered after taking the DMT dose.  Many described it as being aware of the oneness of consciousness, of the infinity of consciousness, of the futility of fearing death, for they saw how consciousness just transitioned from the physical to the metaphysical easily.  Many no longer feared death because of their experiences with DMT.

            Dr. Strassman tried to see how beneficial or therapeutic these sessions could be, but as with all things, it was more dependent on the mindset of the test subject and the setting they were in when they took the DMT. Some people were ready to explore such a vast experience.  Others shied away from it and feared for the loss of their “self.”  As with any powerful experience, what we get out of it is dependent upon what we bring to it.  He was unable to continue his studies on DMT, partly because of these set and setting issues, and partly because of the increasing pressure from the government to curtail all research into mind-altering chemicals, even the ones which showed promise as therapeutic drugs in psychiatry. What is evident is that more research needs to be done, and that there is likelihood that DMT could be the way our body creates a connection to the eternal/divine.  It is worth exploring more, as it seems to correlate with what much of the world’s mystics and shamans and saints have been trying to tell all of us.  Humanity is not separate from nature.  Our individual consciousness is but a small part, a shadow of the eternal consciousness of the multi-verse.  Most of the DMT test subjects experienced the deepest and most profound sense that the connecting tissue of existence is love, pure and simple.  Love.  Love is all you need.  It may be all there really is.

(This book can be downloaded and read in PDF format here: 
http://www.organiclab.narod.ru/books/DMT-The-spirit-molecule.pdf )

Terence McKenna explores Mind-Expansion and the Human Condition

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution – Terence McKenna (1992)

            I first read this book when it came out in 1992, around my sophomore year in college.  Much of the insight of this book was lost on me, as I had not yet had time to understand the very far-reaching socio-historical implications of Terence McKenna’s scholarship.  Picking it up again, after 25 years of growth and reading and experience, only served to impress me even more.  This is a highly important book, and should become a foundation for the changes that humanity must make as a whole in order to thrive, and in order to better live in harmony with the life-world that we take for granted.

            One of the most intriguing questions regarding the development of our species is when and how the roaming primates developed a higher level of consciousness from the other primates on Earth.  There are many proposed ideas, most of them based on theology/mythology and not actual grounded empirical knowledge.  Terence McKenna was one of the very first to propose that the naturally occurring hallucinogenic plants and fungi helped expand the minds of the hominids, who would ingest these items in their search for food.  In a sense, he proposes that these hallucinogenic properties created the first “shamans” who then had to figure out a way to explore the rich world that natural plant hallucinogens open up.  He has much evidence for this, and it does help explain the sudden rise of what we call modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) around 100,000-250,000 years ago, and their/our amazing ability to process information and solve problems.

            After discussing the origins of the human exploration of mind-altering substances, Terence McKenna goes into a very depressing but integral analysis of the role that substance addiction and use affected our human culture.  After the matriarchal, communal, tribal stages of life, where the shamans (initially female, as they were the ones gathering plants and mushrooms and testing them as food, and then both female and male) would open up their minds with these natural compounds, to better understand the needs of the tribe or the patient.  After several millennia, humanity began to live in larger aggregations, in locations that were fixed, and the access to the natural hallucinogens waned.  In this time, the fermented juices and grains began to be used for intoxication as wine and beers.  This new substance was then used much as the old hallucinogens were.

            Once humans managed to distill alcohol, to get purity and strength, it all went to shit.  The problems we face today of alcoholism, rage, violence, and neglect have been around ever since humans distilled the “spirit” of the wine into a potent and toxic drug.  The next drugs to overtake all of humanity, and to continue helping in the degradation of the tribal units, were caffeine, sugar, and tobacco.  Tea initially carried the caffeine addiction but it was not until the spread of coffee, and of the mass manufacture of refined sugar, that caffeine addiction and abuse became a very real thing, and just as deadly as any other drug out there.  Combine this with tobacco, and you have a large amount of the population living constantly in an “altered consciousness” state.  The high from sugar is just as euphoric and the crash just as brutal, as tobacco or caffeine.  The massive and mind boggling extent of the human slave trade was a direct result of the addiction to sugar and the rum that can be created from it.  The Dutch and the British set up a very neat system.  They would gather up slaves in Africa, sell them in the New World to coffee, sugar, and tobacco plantations, buy vast amounts of rum, sugar, and tobacco, sell it all for a massive profit in the UK and Europe, and then go right back to buying humans and selling them off.  This lasted for HUNDREDS of years.

            Once these substances were in use, the state and the merchants combined forces to create vast networks of distribution for these substances.  The British government controlled the tea trade much like drug cartels do so today.  They then decided to get into the opium trade, purposefully flooding China with opium in an effort to make a nation of subservient addicts.  They almost succeeded.  At every step of the way, these drugs were refined and made even more potent and deadly.  Opium was refined to morphine, and thought to be a cure for opium addiction.  Heroin was refined from morphine, and likewise was supposed to combat morphine addiction.  The power of heroin to destabilize and subsume a population is evident when McKenna describes the purposeful distribution by the CIA of an exceedingly pure heroin brought in from Vietnam and surrounding areas.  It was called China White and was released to only the black neighborhoods, creating generations of junkies, unable to stand up for their rights.  Our government and in fact, most governments, use these drug cartels to their own ends.  Most of them are propped up by our support.  Pathetic.

            Terence McKenna continues on to describe his plan for the elimination of what he calls “the Dominator Culture” that we all live in today.  Instead of human unity, our culture pushes and prizes division.  Instead of legalizing natural substances capable of helping people deal with addictions, trauma, and which open the mind to possibilities unknown, our Dominator Culture sets hallucinogens as CLASS 1 drugs, meaning they have absolutely no medicinal, social, scientific value, which is a flat out lie.  It is solely a means by which to control those who would study these amazing plants and fungi.  However, they easily allow the deadliest and most addictive of drugs to be widely marketed and sold in every corner.  Alcohol, tobacco, and sugar products are what keep people subservient, diseased, and mentally dull.  It suits their interests.  It does not suit our own individual rights.  This is why there was such a crackdown on the hippies.  Their drug taking did not lead to subservience and a drone-like ability to do meaningless 9-5 jobs.  They had to be broken and humiliated.  We must all remain robots.  That is what they want and they are succeeding.

(This book can be read here:  https://archive.org/stream/TerenceMckenna-FoodOfTheGods.pdf/TerenceMckenna-FoodOfTheGods_djvu.txt )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

If I Could Have the Nervous System of an Octopus, Without Its Many Arms...

Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness – Peter Godfrey-Smith (2006)

            Much of my reading, and many of the books reviewed here at the Intellectual Journey, deal in some way with the idea of consciousness.  Some books explore the relationship between the outside world and the “inner mind.”  Others seek to understand the raw organic material that our bodies are composed of and why it creates the entity we call Mind.  Still others describe the progress of our collective knowledge and myth-building, especially as they relate to human social constructs like religion and government.  It appears that the human capacity for consciousness and thought inspires many writers, scientists, and philosophers.  One of the great things about this book is that it takes a step back away from our human field of experience, to explore one of the few other animals on Earth that also has a highly complex neurological system, this being the octopus, and their cousins, the squid and the cuttlefish.

            Peter Godfrey-Smith began his journey to writing this book because he witnessed something that many other people who work with or near these amazing animals have noted.  They appear to be observing you, just as much as you are observing them!  They interact with humans, both in the wild and in captivity, like creatures that have some sort of self-consciousness, or sentience.  In the wild, an octopus will often reach out a single tentacle arm towards a human diver, to touch them and taste them (octopuses can sense chemicals with their skin, essentially being able to “smell” and “taste” anything they encounter).  A cuttlefish will often produce the most dramatic displays of color and light through its amazing skin, in a seeming effort to interact.   In captivity, there are countless stories of octopuses that can recognize individual humans in a group, even when they are all dressed exactly the same.  Other octopuses have learned to squirt water with their siphons at people standing outside their tanks.  A few have even learned that a squirt of water is handy in turning off the aquarium lights above their tanks.  They are masters of camouflage, mimicry, and contortion.  Because the largest “solid” part of an octopus is its eyes, it can squeeze through any hole that their eye will fit through, allowing a sixty pound octopus to escape captivity through a two inch hole.  Amazing!

            One of the coolest parts of this book details how the development of an amazing nervous system occurred separately in cephalopods than in primates.  The earliest common ancestor between cephalopods and humans lived very likely over 200 million years ago, back when all animal life was in the oceans.  From this animal a branching occurred, in one direction leading to the bilateral animals, including the ones with spines and bilateral symmetry and in the other branch, a path leading to the mollusks and eventually to the cephalopods studied in this book.  For us humans, much of our nervous system is encased in a hard shell (the skull) and this is the apparent seat of our conscious and unconscious thought.  Nervous signals are received from throughout the body and processed in the brain.  Cephalopods do not work in this manner.

            An octopus has nearly as many neurons as a human, but they are not localized in one certain area.  The octopus’ neural network is spread throughout their entire body, allowing them to have massive control over their shape, color, and skin texture.  Each arm of an octopus has its own functional node of neurons, essentially controlling the arm separately from the main “brain.”  These animals appear to have consciousness of a high order, but they do not have the same equipment as us humans.  In fact, in cuttlefish for instance, each individual neuron reaches from the skin to the brain node, without any other intervening connections.  Humans and most other animals do not work in this way.  We have sequences of neurons, each connected in linear form, to allow signals to travel from our finger to our brain and back.  This, while seemingly super-fast, actually slows down the signals considerably, as not only do electrical signals travel through the neuron, but chemical signals must be released and received in the connections between the neurons.  The octopus does not have this problem, and it’s sensory world must operate on a level that to a human would be unspeakably fast.  

            There is much discussion about the history of the study of sentience and consciousness, which is awesome, and provides a great background into the current state of thought on “thought” itself.  It helps the reader to understand the real differences between human consciousness and cephalopod consciousness, which is critical.  Humans have the ability to process in semantic layers, with some thoughts being submerged, others being lifted, and yet others trying to understand the thoughts being thought!  This creates a massively rich internal life in humans, and in other smart animals that have been studied, such as birds, dogs, dolphins, etc.  The octopus however lacks this inner life it seems.  What it does have is a nearly infinite ability to sense the world around it, to respond to it, and to explore it.  Our brains suit us, as we have a relatively long lifespan and a lot of information to learn as humans.  The octopus and most cephalopods live very short, brutal lives, sometimes not making it past a second year of life.  It did and does not need to store long term memory, to develop individual consciousness like humans.  It instead needs as much input from the world around it as it can get, in order to stay alive and procreate.

            I have always loved octopuses and cuttlefish.  I am so glad I found this cool book.  Peter Godfrey-Smith has given me quite a lot to think about as I continue on my Intellectual Journey.  I will for certain be reading more about the latest research on cephalopod intelligence.  As the writer states, meeting an octopus in its habitat is the closest we may get to meet a truly “alien” intelligence.

(This book can be purchased here: AMAZON  )